Women645–56). The good citizen wife stays indoors. Women who deviate from this
behavior are stereotyped as frightening and unnatural, like Clytemnestra and Medea,
or they are viewed as ‘‘outside’’ of normal gender relations, likehetairassuch as
Aspasia (Blundell 1995:148, 172–80).
Yet our acceptance of the citizen wife as an ideal projection does not undermine or
vitiate the image of female lives offered by ancient sources. As Katz points out, these
images must have made sense in a cultural context (1995:30). Oratory, tragedy, and
comedy were all written for public performance and appraisal. The pictures of women
that they offer must reflect and reinforce the views of the society that produced them.
Citizen wives, irrespective of differences in social and financial status, played a vitally
important role for Athens in ensuring a steady supply of future citizens; they were also
an essential component in the ideology of the home. In order to understand the
images of private female religious behavior that appear in Athenian textual sources,
we must engage more directly with the male representation of female lives. We must
explore the religious occasions where citizen wives become visible and how their
behavior reflects or reinforces the ideology of texts. We must seek to understand how
the relationship between the citizen wife and the house articulates female religious
behavior in public and also in private contexts.
A Woman’s Place
Male Athenian writers and modern classical scholars locate the citizen wife firmly in
the home. She is presented as a creature of the dark, enclosed, interior space,
whose life and interests are intrinsically tied to house and household (Xenophon,
Oeconomicus7.22; Keuls 1985:82–112; Pomeroy 1975:78–84). Her life contrasts
with that of her husband: men are creatures of the public sphere, active and visible in
the public places of the city. The family home is the focus and limit of a citizen wife’s
existence and she leaves it only with her husband’s permission (Schaps 1998:169).
In comedies, the speeches of women affirm the link between citizen wife and home.
In Aristophanes’Lysistrata, Calonice states that it is not easy for women to get out
of the house (16), while in hisThesmophoriazusaethe female Chorus observes the
anger of men at finding their wives have left the house (794–5). An unnamed
male character in a fragmentary passage by Menander notes explicitly that for a
freeborn wife the street door should be the customary limit of her world (Menander
fr. 815 K-A).
The connection between wife and home reflects the fear of men, their need to
control women in order to ensure legitimate offspring and to protect the wealth of
the family (Cohen 1991:140–1; Ogden 1996:100–6). Yet the home also offers
protection to the citizen wife: men may move freely into and out of the house but
women do so only at a cost to their reputation. In a forensic speech by Lysias, the
defendant Euphiletos is careful to place the blame for his wife’s seduction firmly on
the shoulders of the dead Eratosthenes in order to eliminate queries about the
paternity of his son (Lysias 1). Gravestones in the Kerameikos show women with
their families or performing activities that indicate a domestic setting. The home
offers a symbolic stage on which to idealize female behavior: the citizen wives
on gravestones engage in activities commensurate with the ideology of a citizen
Women, Religion, and the Home 299